Up to the cuffs

I now know to turn off the strong incandescent light over my ironing board, before I take a photo. Then the flash on the camera goes off and I get the right colour reproduction. So now my pix are really GREEN.

Here, I have started to pin down the flat fell for the shoulder seam finish. I really can't iron down the flat fell around the shoulder, so I pin it, sew it and then give it a final press. Of course, I did first press the seam allowance as flat as I could toward the body of the jacket.

I usually do a modified flat fell on the underarm seam but since I made the tiny baby clothes recently and flat felled everything there in miniature, I thought I would do a proper, trim-only-one-side flat fell and it worked well. I also did it that way to save thread, because I would only have to sew down the one side, but I think I am going to end up with lots of thread left, I have been so parsimonious.

Now it was time for the contrasting cuffs. I first sewed the blue band to the INside of the sleeve. I used green thread for the top (I think) and blue for the bottom. In any event, I did have the two colours of thread on the machine at the same time.

Then I sewed the ends of the cuffs together, making sure to fold precisely along the seam between the green and blue bands. At this point, I realized it was better to sew with the blue side up, so I could see where to start and end the seam and I didn't change the threads around. As I suspected, it didn't show when I was done anyway, so it didn't matter.

I trimmed the seam allowances fairly closely and turned the cuff to the right side out. Then I pressed along the seam between the blue and green bands, trying to make sure the blue was every so slightly angled toward the inside of the cuff. I wasn't entirely successful along the ends of the cuffs and a tiny line of blue does show there, now that I've finished the topstitching. But really, I don't think it's a big deal.

Finally, I did the topstitching. The way these cuffs are constructed, you fold the seam allowance under and sew the folded edge of the band over the seam line on the OUTside of the sleeve. In this case, it was the green side of the band that got stitched to the outside of the sleeve. Since I have done this manoeuver many times before, I know that in the first, outermost line of topstitching, the line that actually stitches the cuff closed and to the sleeve, the INside line of stitching (the bobbin thread line) actually ends up more on the sleeve part than on the cuff part. Therefore, I used green thread for the top AND bobbin for that line of stitching. You might have to go to the extreme close-up in Flickr to see it, but you can see that on the INside, there is green thread in that one spot. Then I switched to blue bobbin thread and stitched all around the cuff in the two rows required for the top stitching. I'll be doing the same for the bottom band.